Jonathan and I both studied abroad in Israel during our senior year of high school and even though we were there during different semesters, the friends I became close with were from the same high school as him and through them is how we originally met each other. It is through those same friends that our paths continued to cross throughout college (Jonathan attended the University of FL and I attended NYU but would run into him while visiting these same friends), life after college (birthdays, engagements, weddings) and 8 years later after a lot of running into each other, a friendship turned into something much much more.

We knew we wanted a destination wedding so that everyone would feel they were on vacation together, but didn’t want to deal with passports or long flights. We also knew we really wanted to get married on the beach and had dreamt of having the entire wedding, from ceremony to reception, outdoors. So being from the Miami area (even though we have tons of beautiful beaches) we began looking at venues on the west coast of FL to give us the feeling of being far but near. A dear friend suggested we check out the Sandpearl in Clearwater Beach for its gorgeous pure white sand and warm laid back vibe. From the moment we entered the resort it felt magical, they had the perfect beach and gulf lawn to accommodate what we had envisioned and we both knew then we would be able to make our dream wedding a reality.

Saying our vows to each other was a surreal but extremely powerful moment. Wedding planning was incredibly fun and I felt extremely lucky that Jonathan was not only very supportive but also very involved when it came to a lot of the most important aspects, but at the end of the day the commitment we made to each other was what was most significant that day and to write them ourselves was something very personal and important to both of us. Alex, our videographer, incorporated them in our highlights in a way that truly told the story of our wedding day.

Music was a major inspiration and I like to think of our style as some form of hippie beach chic – we wanted to try and blend the laid back hippie aspects of our personalities with the elegance and beauty of a wedding day. That was the inspiration for leaving the grass as our dance floor, being barefoot for the ceremony and having the entire reception outside on the beach. We tried to use some out of the box ideas for seating and table numbers – The seating chart was done on a chalkboard (that our wedding planner’s husband was kind enough to build the week of the wedding!), he made sure to incorporate the little picture of the Airstream RV we used to own and for our massive ‘Royal Table’ as I like to call it, each person had an individual place card which our calligrapher hand wrote with their nickname on it, which was held in a wine cork. This theme carried through to the other table numbers being on bottles of wine. One of my best friends was amazing enough to buy a bunch of tiny frames and place various quotes about love in each one and had them spread out on each of the tables. We also had a basket full of peace and love flip flops for all of the women to change into since dancing in heels would certainly be an issue on the gulf lawn. Instead of a traditional guest book, we had everyone write notes and slip them into a vintage mailbox. It was also really important to us that we honor the memory of our grandparents that are no longer with us and pay tribute to the generations of loving marriages that came before ours, so on the same table as the mailbox, we bought various vintage looking frames and displayed pictures of each our grandparents on their wedding day next to our parents on their wedding day.

Jonathan and I are very big music lovers and often use our vacations to travel for concerts and we’ve done everything from camp in tents to rent RV’s (and then eventually owned and restored an Airstream), so we wanted to incorporate that major part of our lives into the wedding. We really felt strongly about trying to make sure our wedding really felt like us.

Our love of music and concerts was also the obvious inspiration for the Beatles cover band (The British Invasion) – we kept that as a surprise for all of our wedding guests and it was such a hit. It really brought every generation out on the dance floor, singing and dancing the night away. Throughout the wedding we also didn’t have your usual wedding songs played, we made sure that in between The Beatles our DJ played songs that meant something to us, everything from Dave Matthews and Coldplay to Kenny Chesney & Tim McGraw.

There was a moment when Jonathan and I were the only ones on the dance floor and he just whispered to me, “look out there, they are all here for us.” And it was just one of those incredible moments where it hits you that this is your wedding day; you are surrounded by your closest family and friends and to have them all under the same roof (or stars in our case) happens only once. It gave us a moment to breathe that in together and Ryan Joseph, our unbelievable photographer, captured this moment in the photos.